業者簡介

關於VDC Research

目錄

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A year ago VDC reported that Machine Vision and Industrial Barcode Scanning held a combined market size of $7.5B. These oft-paired technologies grew by 11% annually over the prior 3 years, and were projected to expand by 7.9% per annum in our five year forecast, based on tracking of nearly 50 vendors.

The combination of advance camera-based technologies with increasingly sophisticated software and analytics capabilities is opening up the market and expanding use cases and applications beyond “traditional” inspection and data-capture systems. Walmart and Kroger use systems in automated operations to fill on-line orders ten times faster than humans. Tyson uses computer vision in its poultry processing and has lowered labor, boosted production line throughput, and achieved nearly 100% accuracy when weighing foods. Amazon warehouses, and operations such as Pill-Pak, would not be possible without machine vision and industrial scanning.

These are complementary technologies, with a low-level machine vision system being quite comparable to a 2D imager based barcode scanning system. From a technology standpoint there's a lot of crossover. Current barcode readers are becoming more and more capable of reading more than just a barcode; they essentially are simple machine vision systems. As an interesting product development, Omron MicroHAWK scanner can be configured as either a vision or a scanning device, changeable by the user. According to Omron, this helps customers, and more importantly channel members, with a flexible solution that can be leveraged for multiple use cases.

2019 was an aberrant, down year for machine vision and industrial barcode scanning, with under 3% growth. Almost every vendor was hit hard by a marked economic slowdown in China, and Coronavirus exacerbates this, entering 2020. There is much near-term market uncertainty leading VDC to lower our forecasts for 2020 and 2021 before the market recovers. However, the long-term outlook remains strong with a growing library of use cases and applications driving adoption.

KEY FINDINGS

Market Size and Growth: VDC sizes the global machine vision market, including hardware, software, services and accessories at $7.18B in 2018 and estimated at $7.39B for 2019, based on vendor reporting through the first three quarters of the year. The full report quantifies VDC's projections for growth over the forthcoming five years.

Key Technology Trends: The core technology of machine vision, the camera, is trending in multiple directions. Toward the upper end of the product spectrum, numerous vendors are releasing or announcing (soon to be released) high performance cameras with 60 to 75 megapixel image resolution.

Key Regional Trends: For the most part, VDC observes more similarities than differences between regions. Of course, regions are different sizes and growth rates (Asia largest at $3.06B in 2018, EMEA second at $2.36B, and lastly Americas at $1.76BB) and have unique conditions (Coronavirus, Brexit, and US tariffs, to name a few). However, all vendors report that products and solutions are mostly similar across regions.

Key Industry and Application Trends: Machine Vision was originally a “nice to have” for many industries, but increasingly it's a “must have”. As a first example, in Electronics and Semiconductors, the largest sector for machine vision, vision is critical for 5G, as mobile devices have stricter manufacturing specifications than their 4G predecessors, to achieve the necessary signal integrity to deliver 5G.

Key Competitive Trends: VDC tracks the top 40 machine vision vendors, and sees hundreds more at industry events such as Promat and Automate. Leading vendors such as Cognex, Keyence, Omron, SICK, Basler, Baumer and Datalogic make a wide range of vision products plus adjacent offerings to create solutions including software and services. The full report monitors 50 vendors for market size and growth calculations, and profiles 12 leading vendors in depth.